These three schools or sects, Ku-sha, J[=o]-jitsu, and Ris-shu, may be grouped under the Hinayana or Smaller Vehicle, with more or less affiliation with Southern Buddhism; the others now to be described were wholly of the Northern division.

The Hoss[=o]-shu, or the Dharma-lakshana sect, as described by the Rev. Dai-ryo Takashi of the Shin-gon sect, is the school which studies the nature of Dharmas or things.  The three worlds of desire, form and formlessness, consist in thought only; and there is nothing outside thought.  Nine centuries after Gautama, Maitreya,[11] or the Buddha of kindness, came down from the heaven of the Bodhisattva to the lecture-hall in the kingdom in central India at the request of the Buddhas elect, and discounted five shastras.  After that two Buddhist fathers who were brothers, composed many more shastras and cleared up the meaning of the Mah[=a]yan[=a].  In 629 A.D., in his twenty-ninth year, the famous Chinese pilgrim, Gen-j[=o] (Hiouen-thsang), studied these shastras and sciences, and returning to China in 645 A.D., began his great work of translation, at which he continued for nineteen years.  One of his disciples was the author of a hundred commentaries on sutras and shastras.  The doctrines of Gen-j[=o] and his disciples were at four different times, from 653 to 712 A.D., imported into Japan, and named, after the monasteries in which they were promulgated, the Northern and Southern Transmission.

The Middle Path.

The burden of the teachings of this sect is subjective idealism.  They embrace principles enjoining complete indifference to mundane affairs, and, in fact, thorough personal nullification and the ignoring of all actions by its disciples.  In these teachings, thought only, is real.  As we have already seen with the Ku-sha teaching, human beings are of three classes, divided according to intellect, into higher, middle and lower, for whom the systems of teachings are necessarily of as many kinds.  The order of progress with those who give themselves to the study of the Hoss[=o] tenets, is,[12] first, they know only the existence of things, then the emptiness of them, and finally they enter the middle path of “true emptiness and wonderful existence.”

From the first, such discipline is long and painful, and ultimate victory scarcely comes to the ordinary being.  The disciple, by training in thought, by destroying passions and practices, by meditating on the only knowledge, must pass through three kalpas or aeons.  Constantly meditating, and destroying the two obstacles of passion and cognizable things, the disciple then obtains four kinds of wisdom and truly attains perfect enlightenment or Pari-Nirvana.